The present invention deals with localization of data in a computing environment. More specifically, the present invention relates to localization of data in business objects (or business entities).
Business entities are objects that are employed in a business computing environment. For example, objects that represent customers (Customer entities), inventory (Inventory entities), and orders (Order entities) can all be business entities. These entities represent data that is related to business applications. The data in a Customer entity, for example, represents a customer such as the customer's name, address, etc. The data in an Inventory entity represents inventory such as part number, description, name, etc., and the data in an Order entity represents a particular order from a customer such as order number, quantity, etc.
Business entities can be used by developers in creating many different types of business applications. Such applications, for example, can track orders and inventory, and implement customer management and customer relations, and many other business related activities.
Localization is a process by which information is adapted to more closely conform to how the data would be expressed in a particular locale, using norms of that particular locale. A very straightforward example of localization is simply language translation. In other words, a particular expression is displayed to the user in the language indigenous to the locale of the user.
In the past, localization has been accomplished through the use of resource files. Specific resource files were retrieved based on the locale of the user, and the information in the retrieved resource file was used. However, this presents a variety of problems. Foremost among those problems is that resource files may typically be unchangeable by a developer. Therefore, while the use of resource files may work for localizing static information, it does not work for localizing dynamic information.
Business applications will typically contain a wide variety of dynamic information that will desirably be localized. For example, inventory entities will contain descriptions for one company, that will be entirely different for another company, simply because the inventory for two different companies will be different. Therefore, the dynamic information used in business applications is not a good candidate for localization through the use of resource files.